BREAKING: Kamala Harris Confirms Trump Electoral College Victory

Except for the apparent inability of the Protection Racket Media to comprehend the ceremony, the Electoral College count went off without a hitch. True to her word, Vice President Kamala Harris fulfilled the constitutional duty of her office to preside over the count and registration of the election. The victories of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance therefore became official … but not “certified,” blast it:

BREAKING: In her role as president of the Senate, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris presided over a joint session of Congress to certify President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 election win. https://t.co/lFwmybDXgH pic.twitter.com/s8CYBq8PcN

— ABC News (@ABC) January 6, 2025

The New York Times made the same error in its reporting, as well as another:

Live Updates: Congress Certifies Trump’s Victory

Vice President Kamala Harris announces Donald J. Trump’s win in a ritual that was considered ceremonial and uneventful before a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol in 2021.

Ahem. Congress does not certify the election; they only count the votes in the Electoral College. Presidential election results are certified by the states and are presented by their official slate of electors. Neither ABC nor the NYT recognizes this, even though that literally was the issue at hand four years ago, and it’s the point that Congress clarified in their bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act in 2022. 

As for the second NYT claim, that’s also nonsense. Democrats began challenging state results in 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry. Senator Barbara Boxer forced a vote on a challenge to the electors from Ohio, despite the fact that the state had certified only one slate and had no dispute over the outcome in that election. Under the previous rules, it only took one member from each chamber to issue such a challenge; in 2022, Congress upped it to require far more members to enable such challenges [see update below].

Those changes appear to have worked. No one challenged any electors, and Congress did the job it’s supposed to do — count the votes, not certify them. “Certify” implies that Congress has some sort of supervisory role in approving electors, and that the Vice President can impact whether electors are approved. The only role Congress has is in settling disputes when states certify more than one slate of electors, which actually happened in 1876 (Florida, natch). That’s it. The challenges of the last 20 years have not been legitimately within congressional authority, which the 2022 law did not change but makes even more clear than before. 

In other words, since there were no conflicts with elector slates, today’s events were entirely ceremonial, outside of the formal registering of the votes. 

How uncomfortable was it for Harris? Presumably not much more uncomfortable than it was for Mike Pence, or Al Gore in 2000 (after his own legal challenges to the election results in Florida), or Richard Nixon in 1960. Harris could have passed this duty onto the Senate President Pro Tempore, who would be Chuck Grassley now that the new session of Congress has been sworn in. It would have been poor sportsmanship, although I believe Hubert Humphrey passed on presiding over the Electoral College count in 1969 (I can’t find the reference to it now), but he was suffering from depression at the time, too. 

Give Harris credit for following through and powering through it as professionally and expeditiously as possible. And now, let’s quit making this A Thing and get back to regular order in politics. 

Update: Just to close the loop, here are the main changes to the Electoral Count Act made by Congress in 2022:

The vice president, it says, “shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”

The new law also raised the threshold for members of Congress to object to a state’s electoral count, from a single member to at least one-fifth of the members of both the House and Senate. That provision was meant to deter frivolous objections that have been raised by members of both parties over the years with little evidence to back up claims of impropriety in the election or the electoral tabulation. And it limits the grounds for such challenges. …

The legislation also imposed new requirements on states to make certain that competing slates of electors were not presented to Congress, something that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to engineer in 2020. It also prevents states from making election law changes after the election and sets out a path for expedited court review of claims of illegal election meddling.

At least the NYT acknowledges somewhere that EC-count chicanery has been around for a lot longer than just 2021.